


Song of the Lost

by Bibliophile030



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Gen, Magic, Spirits, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 16:48:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21341494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bibliophile030/pseuds/Bibliophile030
Summary: Wandering, always watching. Unseen and unknown...Until one day a little boy with dirty red hair and piercing gray eyes glares right at him and tries to punch his astral form.Guardian angel or demon in disguise?As Allen begins his journey as an exorcist, more questions rise to the nature of his inhuman companion and where he fits in the war between Innocence and Akuma,, exorcists and Noah.For as he always told Red, "I am not human nor seek to be human. I am what I am, nothing more and nothing less."
Kudos: 8





	Song of the Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Welp, wrote this a while back and realized it was gathering dust in my drive. Spruced it up and decided to offer it to the masses as part of NaNoWriMo. Enjoy. Or don't.  
Expect sporadic updates.

“Who' the hell are ya?”

The cloaked figure said nothing, staring off to the side.

“Ya bastard! Don't ignore m-” The little waif, no more than three or four (he had been abandoned since as long as he could remember, how the hell would he know the ‘xact number?) yelped.

Instead of smacking into the figure, _he_ _went right through him!_

The figure didn't pay the yelling child any mind, but it was another thing for said child to overbalance and tumble right through his body and into the muck of the alley in front of him.

“Child, did you just try to hit me?”

Red shivered at the voice, somewhat high but still recognizably male, probably an older kid. Their voices got all high and messed up at that age if Red remembered from listening to some of the older kids. But there was an odd undertone, the accent careful and rich like some noble brat but _off._

His gut told him this guy wasn't ordinary if the whole bloody ghost act didn't do it for the child.

“Y-yea? Wha' of it?”

The cloaked figure drew his hood down. Pupil-less white orbs gazed down from a strangely shrouded black face, like smoke clung to it.

Red scrambled back immediately, putting some distance between him and the creepy whatever-the-fuck-this-was.

“No human should be able to do that,” the figure hummed, “unless on the edge of death and life. Yet, as runty and underfed as you are, you're certainly not about to die in the next few minutes from my understanding of human biology.”

Red conveniently ignored most of the weirdo's little speech (too many big words) mind latching onto one word.

“Hey! Who're ya calling runty ya ghost basta’d?!”

“I’ve only being accurate. Judging by your current health, you’re well on your way to becoming severely malnourished, though. That would probably stunt your growth in the future.”

“Talk _English,_ ya ghost basta’d!”

That marked the start of Red and the strange being’s continuous acquaintance, much to the former’s ire and annoyance.

‘Parently the ghost wasn’t a ghost but a _spirit_ – the first was something humans became but spirits were spirits, though they had all sorts of other names given by humans, mostly because humans like to name things (the guy went off on a spiel about names, but Red barely paid it any mind – as in none at all).

They were the things all those fairy tales described. Everything from fairies and genies, guardian angels and monsters, to a particular favorite: demons.

Name a place, a spirit featured in their local legends.

Crazy.

Spirits could show themselves to normal humans, but most thought why the hell should they? Humans in the end died while spirits remained on earth more or less, a handful vanishing over the years.

(Red couldn’t blame them for feeling that way. Heck, if Red could disappear from other humans when he wanted, he would do it all time!)

When asked how that disappearing thing happened (if there was a way to get rid of his ghost – spirit, whatever) the spirit shrugged and said it wasn’t something the elder spirits talked about to someone his age.

His ghost was a right old geezer, too, since an adult spirit was millennia-years-old compared to the ghost’s rough several centuries (Red snorted at the vague number, how the hell did the guy not know his own damn age?)

For the spirit, Red was an interesting little human; he was different than any human they ever observed.

For one, he could _see_ despite the spirit’s invisibility being in effect.

Red was incredulous about this, understandably. _I’m just some kid, nothin’ special. Heck, even my own parents didn’t want me! _

So, he didn’t believe him about being the only one to see him until the spirit decided to demonstrate it by rushing right in front a few uniformed humans and quite loudly proclaiming the little auburn street urchin had just foisted dozens of pounds from passing street traffic.

Red's response to this (once they were away from the officers) was to throw rocks, all harmlessly phasing through the spirit. But the orphan now did believe him (a little).

Eventually, Red paid the spirit less mind since he didn't _do_ anything per se; nothing Red really objected to. Sometimes he could be useful, giving the street urchin a head's up on the bobbies making their rounds and playing lookout when Red snuck through the market stalls for a quick bit and some ‘loose’ change.

As for the spirit, he didn’t mind answering Red’s questions or helping the small child every now and again. Even when the child tried a number of things to drive him away, the spirit only showed amusement.

It wasn’t exactly like he had anything better to do.

Contrary to popular myths and legends, higher beings like himself had no obligation to the material plane.

They weren’t human nor ever were. They existed. That was all.

Sure, they had the ability to help (or destroy), but it was all to a spirit’s own personal whims or shade of morality to do so.

Since their true forms were that of bodiless intangible masses of light, energy, and darkness, the form they manifested on the material plane was completely of their own imaginations. Beast or human, object or element, they could be literally anything they wanted to be.

The same applied to a spirit’s morality, or lack thereof. Just as some inspired the tales of guardian angels and gods, they had just as many members who spurred and spawned stories of monsters and devils. And there were numerous shades in-between, from calculating djinn, ambiguous fey, or amoral mages and witches.

They were a whimsical lot, guided by their own desires and decisions.

Religion was something most hardly paid any mind. Each spirit formed their own opinions on creation and destruction if they thought of it at all.

* * *

One day, Red and the spirit came upon a dying man during the former’s numerous nightly activities (thievery and foraging the dumpsters).

To the youth’s utter bewilderment, the spirit had no qualms walking (more like drifting) over to the future corpse.

Red felt his jaw drop as the spirit began to _sing_. It wasn’t just singing, either!

It was as if the urchin came upon something…_otherwordly_ (after hanging around so long, it wasn’t surprising for the child to pick upon on the other’s vocabulary). It was as if Red intruded on something he should neither hear or see.

The fact something shiny and misty suddenly gathered around the body then suddenly disappeared, didn’t exactly go against this view.

Upon the child’s demand to know “what the hell was that?”, the spirit explained about how his people perceived things.

For one, they didn’t really have a language. Or even a singular name for themselves, so Red calling him a ghost-bastard didn’t really offend him. They did not have a personal name for their race for all humans keep naming them new things, and they had no desire as such. For spirits, the arbitrary-contrived notion of language wasn’t even a pale reflection of how spirits perceived the world.

The best description would be to say everything had its own tune, so to speak. Music. Everything from complex humans and their emotions and desires down to the solemn little melody of an ant. Even objects could carry a few notes, some through the bits and pieces collected from the melodies of others, some through the gaining of a kind of sentience, almost, from a long existence soaking up the passing notes and melodies to have come across a thing.

A spirit could even sing parts of these personal songs, though usually only to the dying who could see them. It gave these unfortunate souls comfort in the end, the music drawing the soul gently out of their mortal shells as the spirit demonstrated with the unfortunate dying (and now dead) person.

Where they went afterwards, no spirit really knew. If they did, the knowledge was kept to themselves.

A spirit’s ability to sing soul music was an interesting thing in of itself. It wasn’t so much a single song, really, but a multiple faceted thing, many streams intertwined to convey everything of a person right down to their true self.

Even humming the simplest layer of music could affect a human in some way.

Negatively or positively, well, the spirits weren’t saints. What could soothe could also madden and manipulate.

Luckily for the red-haired child, the spirit he met fell on the lighter tones of gray in the grand scale of human-based morality.

In fact, the wandering spirit liked to drift through obscure alleyways since there was a higher chance they might come upon a dying soul, usually criminals on the bad end of a heist or the victims of one.

The spirit was frank with Red that he wasn’t the guardian angel sort, there were spirits who deliberately sought out the highest concentration of dying humans, usually around hospitals, battlefields, or the blackest dens of depravity.

Compared to this, his usual haunts were pretty tame (no joke intended).

And there were just as many who hung around those places for the nearly the polar opposite: to torment and play on humans while in their last moments. And there were still others who liked to pick on ordinary people or powerful ones and send their lives into disarray.

Compared to them, the spirit was very laidback, helping if someone needed help in front of him, but hardly going out of his way for the human race.

He was highly regarded as odd among his own kind, but not for that. For one, he loved human languages. Many spirits, even fellow wanderers, either hated or had no interest in learning human languages. They had no need since humans never saw them except in their last moments, and they held their own language as superior.

This spirit, on the other hand, always made sure to linger and learn the local dialects whenever he moved onto a new city or country.

Odder still, the spirit actually referred to themselves by a gender _and_ a name.

At this, Red demanded a name to put to his new stalker ghost.

The spirit obliged and said he called himself Malakai (“Figures ya had a sissy name, ya ghost bastard!”).

Malakai tilted his head slightly at the orphan and asked, “And you? I call myself Malakai out of liking for the sound of it, but why the name Red?”

In answer, the small child whipped off the mitt he always wore on his right arm.

Red was fully prepared for the spirit to act just like everyone else whoever saw his cursed arm. Instead, the ghost bastard quirked his head weirdly at it and said it was probably something his elders once told the younger spirit, a material called Innocence, whatever the hell that was; Red thought the name sounded too girly and pure for something hideous and the bane of his short life.

The ghost also commented on how the arm had its own melody, but hard to hear since it was asleep.

That made a lot of nothin’ in terms of sense.

Since the auburn-headed child didn’t demand any more answers, the spirit fell silent, and the matter was dropped.

That was how it was usually, the spirit not the most vocal of people. He would always give some answer, though, if Red felt like asking or knowing about something.

They lived in an almost comfortable coexistence at this point, Red barely getting by while the spirit helped in little ways when not wandering off somewhere.

Then the directionless child found a place at the circus. He mostly did grunt work, cleaning out the animal cages, preparing the stage and props, and running errands for the ringmaster and various performers.

It wasn't exactly extravagant and there were days Red went without food, but anything was better than the freak show who 'owned' him before the circus master bought him.

The circus folk were relatively decent, full of weirdos and other orphans.

Except for Cosimo, that guy was a right bastard that could get eaten by the lions one dark and cold night.

Red didn’t care for anyone there, not with his useless _red_ left arm. The circus folk accepted orphans, but his wonky arm made more than a few give the child the cold shoulder (“Unnatural,” they whispered behind his back when they _thought_ he couldn’t hear them).

Devil touched, cursed, Red heard them all.

Humans were cruel, judgmental beings.

That was why Red liked animals more. There was even this dog who licked the hand of his cursed arm without looking the least bit disgusted.

Then Cosimo had to go and kill the mutt. He met Mana right after that.

The crazy clown wouldn’t leave him alone after Red cried after the dead dog like some sissy. He was always there, asking after the orphan’s health or showing Red some new clown tricks. Red liked to learn the tricks, but the questions were annoying the hell out of him.

Cosimo, the jealous bastard, finally got tired of working with the crazy man, and the ringmaster chose his senior worker over the new guy.

Somehow, Red got fired, too, as the crazy man’s assistant (“Who needs ya?!” the orphan yelled as he ran after the tall man).

Red was too furious with the asses to correct them, and honestly, it was time for the orphan to leave anyways; might as well join up with the loon.

* * *

Mana Walker was crazy but not that dangerous or unmanageable for the street-smart and hardened orphan, even on his ‘bad’ days.

Although, Malakai seemed leery of the older man, drifting out of sight when the man walked over during one of their “lessons” (longer than usual conversations where the spirit attempted to explain what he called the basics of human education).

After Red quit fuming about the spirit’s frank declaration of the orphan being illiterate and ill-informed, he found the sporadic lessons the spirit offered not that bad. Especially as the spirit had a sort of blunt method of teaching and equally corrected harshly as when he complimented. At least the spirit was honest compared to a lot of Red’s own kind.

Anyways, Malakai seemed oddly evasive when the orphan asked what his problem with Mana was.

“He’s broken,” the spirit finally answered some dark wintry night.

“Hard not to notice,” Red snarked.

The spirit shook his head (for some reason, Malakai thought it amusing to take on Red’s appearance instead of his frankly disturbing spirit sub-form which looked like a piece of the night sky came down and was trying to eat him). As a concession to the child throwing things at him again when not cursing him out for it, the spirit obliged to sharpen the facial features, adding more brown highlights to his hair than Red’s. The eyes remained that creepy white, though (something along the lines of “eyes being the windows of the soul” or somethin’).

“Broken in soul, not just mind. But I don’t think it’s one of my kind’s doing.”

“Broken in soul? And why not one of you weirdos, you don’t exactly have laws or nothin’.”

The spirit frowned but clarified, “We may not have any sort of established governance, but we do have taboos. Rather, we have one unspoken law all spirits learn in their lifetime the old-fashion way; through experience.”

“And that is…?”

“We do not break souls. We may influence, maybe so far as twist parts of the melody, but we do not break it or warped it to the point of near unrecognition. We are an _aural_ race; the sound of a malformed soul is natural in a way; some souls inevitably become so with or without our influence. A soul can change, their song adding new sounds and stanzas or losing them as they experience life.”

Malakai gestured at Red. “You, for example. As Red-arm, your music was always somewhat violent. When you left with Mana and referred to yourself as just Red, it became calmer and not so abrupt. Happier. It grew as you grew in personality, in a crude way of saying it.”

The spirit shook his head. “However, a broken soul is like a discordant ramble of screeches and half-conveyed notes – meaningless and frankly almost unbearable. That’s why we never sing the core melody of a _living_ thing’s soul.”

“Why not?” Red wondered aloud. “And what the hell is this “core melody” crap?”

Malakai sighed deeply. “Eloquent as always. The core melody is the spiritual heart of a person. They declare the integral parts and experiences of a person which cannot be changed without altering everything about a person. For all the masks humans wear, beneath it all is their true face, so to speak. As for why…remember, the purpose of my people’s singing is to draw out the soul. However, a healthy vessel will resist and pull the soul back as they are meant to do, the living will and mind resisting the loss. Things start to tear. And damages like that do not heal. A core melody becomes forever incomplete even if the rest of the music surrounding it is fine. Eventually, the dissonance spreads if another of my kind doesn’t contain the damage in some fashion and attempts to fix it. For the person, they will experience psychological maladies, hallucinations, multiple personalities…the list goes on. And believe me, naturally born madness and unnaturally created madness sound very differently from one another. But this…”

The spirit gestured toward Mana. “Him? It’s like he’s only half a person, half of a grand orchestra. Nothing good could come of associating with him, Red.”

The orphan frowned hard but said nothing. The silence told the spirit just how stubborn the little human who captivated him was.

Red continued to follow Mana Walker as they found work as wandering clowns. They moved from town to town, peddling their tricks and performances for money (all the while, Red slipping in and out of the crowds for some extra dough).

No matter how much Mana Walker disturbed him, Malakai kept returning to Red’s side.

* * *

Red was about ten when Mana Walker died in that carriage accident.

He lost something that night, so when the big, gray, and fat guy came saying he could bring the man back, the orphan lost his head and agreed.

In the background, Malakai was shaking his head and yelling for Red to change his mind, several meters back from the hilltop grave.

He should have listened, should have waited, and should have at least thought twice of this goblin-like man who appeared out of nowhere!

He was a survivor of the streets, so how could he let himself be so played?

Mana Walker rose as an akuma, and Red’s cursed arm stole his life once more. For that, his father-figure cursed him.

He didn’t really remember anything after that, falling into some sort of stupor according to the new weirdo, his master Marian Cross.

Red disappeared, and Allen Walker took his place.

When the black-coated man explained his arm was Innocence, the white-head widened his eyes, gaze briefly darting over to Malakai.

_Wasn’t that what you called it? How did you know that?_ Re-Allen’s eyes seemed to say to the wandering spirit.

Malakai knew he somehow got attached to this fleeting life. His own life would stretch several times that of human’s lifetime, so he _shouldn’t _care.

But he did.

“Humans aren’t worth it,” the elders always warned the new generation. “We are only visitors of the material plane. This isn’t our home, nor will it ever be.”

His first impulse upon seeing the Millennium Earl was to drag his near-comatose friend away from his not-father’s grave.

Spirits _hated_ the Earl. Their powers made them at odds with the man, especially the guardian types. Souls in of themselves were sacred, and their innate gift allowed them to send them off eventually to a peaceful afterlife.

What the Earl did was an infringement to that power, an insult to every spirit. Human ghosts and souls found themselves suddenly chained and _warped_, the dark matter eating away at their soul music, twisting and shattering it into something foul and nearly unrecognizable.

That was nearly unforgivable as meddling with core melodies deliberately and will full knowledge of what you were doing.

And don’t even get him started on how drawing a soul back like that affected one’s soul music on its own without adding in the forced merger of dark matter and the shell’s own lingering shrieking cacophony of terror, grief, and pain.

It couldn’t be even called music at a certain point, just horrible noise worse than what a spirit could bear to even attempt if they had some twisted idea to replicate the result.

His people couldn’t even do anything to free the souls, the tainted material of the spell-made chains too strong on a metaphysical level, their music at best paralyzing the tainted souls, but never strong enough to force separation.

They could do a little more if they materialized fully, but spirits innately loathed to do so.

They were too vulnerable like that, and the material world too harsh.

Grudgingly, they supported the efforts of exorcists if only because their Innocence purified souls, sloughing away the dark energy.

Then the hard work fell upon the spirits to restore the missing pieces the dark matter had destroyed from the akuma’s twisting song (no exorcist could begin to understand how killing the akuma only freed the soul from further corruption. They were not free to leave the earth in their current state, though).

But for Red, he would have materialized to fight off the akuma if Allen’s Innocence hadn’t intervened. The formerly sedate song rose into a crescendo upon activation. The melody was odd, though, incomplete, giving its music a somber quality with the missing notes.

There was something wrong with the akuma’s soul, too. Mana Walker’s soul music was odd in the first place, even discounting how it was half of what should be (entire sections of music were outright absent, silences at awkward points and plain unnerving. People had their ups and down, but life continued until the end; soul music wasn’t meant to have periods of complete silence for more than a few measures).

It was like Mana Walker was a humanized akuma, music not twisted like a true akuma, but certainly not right like any other human.

And that discounted the eerie and dark strains weaving in and out of the music, ephemeral and mystic in intonation. Otherworldly, almost (sometimes, Malakai heard strains of madness and a dark tone underlying the admittingly rich melody).

And when he became an incomplete akuma?

Malakai could not seem to recall the music itself for some reason, but he vividly recalled how wrong it made him feel. Too saccharine and grating at the same time.

It was really hard to remember anything concerning Mana Walker or his akuma after that night.

Malakai stayed silent about his suspicions. He wondered if Allen remembered that conversation from years ago; it seemed the former urchin had forgotten a lot of things from his time as Red when he took up the name Allen for good.

Allen asked him if he sung Mana’s soul to the other side. At the time, the spirit fell silent, unable to answer; he hedged, telling the exorcist-in-training he didn’t really remember much of anything from that night with the combined dissonance of akuma and maker (maybe the latter’s presence was the reason for the obscured memories, the elder spirits warned against confronting the being without explaining why).

Allen accepted his answer with a kind of understanding look Red never sported in the entire time the spirit knew the other’s past personality. It highlighted how much Allen had buried Red away in the depths of his mind and memories.

Then the whitehead asked if Malakai would kindly mend the souls of the akuma Allen would inevitably free as an exorcist (it was still odd for Re-Allen to have the ability to see and hear the spirit properly. Especially his singing since soul songs always sounded off and unbearable to any other human if a spirit chose to broadcast their songs; the truth of the world was hard to accept for mortals).

Malakai had to be honest with himself and say he could no longer regard himself as a simple wandering spirit; he was for good or for ill, a guardian spirit, Red _and_ Allen’s personal guardian angel and an angel of death following in the exorcist’s wake.

And mercy on any soul, living or dead, who messed with the young exorcist.


End file.
